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Idea Stock Exchange 160

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the soylent-futures dept.
Retrospeak writes to tell us The New York Times has an interesting article on an interesting business strategy used by a company called Rite-Solutions. The system recognizes the need for harvesting ideas from the entire company instead of just one or two "idea-men" in a stock-market-esque idea exchange. From the article: "We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I. "At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius."
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Idea Stock Exchange More

Idea Stock Exchange

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  • Hey (Score:5, Funny)

    by smvp6459 ( 896580 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:03PM (#14999060)
    Can I sell ideas short?

    • Re:Hey (Score:4, Funny)

      by B3ryllium ( 571199 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:26PM (#14999147) Homepage
      They call that "marketing".
    • the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management

      I thought this was always the case.

      • Re:Hey (Score:4, Insightful)

        by moro_666 ( 414422 ) <kulminaator@ g m a i l.com> on Sunday March 26, 2006 @04:28PM (#14999359) Homepage
        Re:

        "We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here," Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions' headquarters outside Newport, R.I.


          Admitting to the reality is actually a vital sign of the intelligence in the leadership. If you'd hire people more stupid than you in any intellectual business, you're f-d.

          I wish my boss would consider this fact in some areas more often :) I think it's a quite normal case in any IT company, the bosses are "oldschoolers", meaning sure they know how a pic cpu works and how perl text databases are cool, but their knowledge doesn't always map to the current situation out there. Transaction rdbms is the word, not a text database.

          I do understand that the bosses in situations like that usually do realize that their workforce is more talented or at least more up-to-date in the expertise, but unluckily for the workers, the selfpride of the bosses preceeds the rationality that you'd expect.

          Anyway, seems like one company (at least officially) is trying to fight the /disease/, i hope they do well and give a good example to the others.

          Ps. how would you fight this "pride" issue ? My current strategy is either to explain very calmly my selections in development paths or if that fails, just go along and point the primary reason out when it starts to fall apart... Humans are supposed to learn most from their "personal" failures.

        • I would choose to work with bosses with significantly less clue than me. Enough that they *know* I'm better qualified than them. Every time I've been in a situation where it's felt "good", the boss has been fairly non-technical.

          Also, I still defer various forms of development decisions to them - and give them my best estimates at what the costs and benefits of each path is. I do NOT try to force the decision - it is their decision, I'm just giving them the information they need to perform it.

          This t

          • In a way, by always working for the non-technical, you are forcing yourself into the top position as a technologist, which is translating raw ideas into software. Maybe that's why you like it so much. ;-)
            • I don't always work for the non-technical - I just have found that to be what generally works best. Techs very often think they know more about the problem area than they do, and thus will override based on their "gut feeling", and do tech judgements without consulting the person that's actually working on the specific things.

              A non-technical *has* to rely on the information supplied by the techs.

              Eivind.

  • Japanese methods? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CarpetShark ( 865376 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:04PM (#14999065)
    Didn't the Japanese have methods like this way back in the 80s??
  • My ideas most involve inflatable sex toy, small rodent and chocolate spread. Where do I sign up?

  • A market for innovation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LadyLucky ( 546115 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:06PM (#14999078) Homepage
    Just as stock exchanges and other markets have created the flow of money that has been the foundation of modern capitalism and the greatest wealth engine in the history of mankind, a market for innovation may well be the next step.

    How often is the person with the idea and the vision the guy with the business smarts to capitalize on it? How often does a company with excellent execution thirst for the next big idea? A marketplace for ideas and innovation is possibly the solution to this.

    It may be unpopular here, but in order to make such a market work properly, it's necessary to have the necessary protection for ideas and innovations - i.e., intellectual property laws need to be improved. That isn't to say that draconian laws are needed, but if I have an idea, I need a reasonable expectation that I will not get fleeced by offering it on a marketplace.

    An efficient innovation market backed up by appropriate laws may well be the next driver of wealth.

    • How often is the person with the idea and the vision the guy with the business smarts to capitalize on it? How often does a company with excellent execution thirst for the next big idea? A marketplace for ideas and innovation is possibly the solution to this.

      Same thing with science. There are a lot of brilliant scientists who spend their time researching really trivial stuff because they can't think of anything better. And at the same time, there are a lot of people with great ideas of research projects who
      • LoL

        Good luck with that one, don't think there exists a server large enough to store all that info ;-)

        P.S. the majority of it would be filled with questions that are alread answered.
      • What if we created a system like Wikipedia, but instead of holding the sum of all human knowledge it held the sum of all human ignorance? I.e., people could post questions on topics that science could answer but hasn't yet.

        I'd like to suggest a sister site that would contain questions that science has already answered but isn't aware of yet. Data mining is going to be a huge and beneficial industry once a few CEOs and politicians are done away with (and I mean that in a strictly nonviolent way, officer
      • Try for example some unmoderated sci.physics.* groups...
      • Well I fear that would be an order of magnitude bigger than Wikipedia :)
    • I have a hundred ideas every day. It's easy to come up with ideas. The hard work is in trying to figure out if the idea is feasable, gathering resources, manufacturing, marketing, etc.

      Your system would allow anybody with an idea to instantly stop anybody who is actually trying to accomplish something by working. It rewards the people who sit on their ass all day and type their goofy ideas into a web site hoping somebody actually tries to make something some day.

      That's the problem with patents. It punish peo
      • Reminds me of an article [oreillynet.com] by Derek Silvers (creator of CD Baby).

        "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions."
      • I agree completely -- ideas are cheap.

        In my experience, people who argue for stronger "IP protection" and the possibility to trade with ideas are often those with few ideas of their own (and hence think there is great value in them, I guess).

    • Here in the UK, the last thing companies want is new ideas. They all tell you they have enough ideas already. "F#@% off with your new ideas - we have enough already" is what management, especially financial management will tel you.

      If anyone wants ideas enogh to actually pay money for them, let me know. (I mean good, sound engineering ideas that will make someone a million dollars a year or maybe a billion. This is engineering - actual long-term investment required.)

    • I need a reasonable expectation that I will not get fleeced by offering it on a marketplace

      Definition of "to fleece" (Webster): to charge excessively for goods or services

      I think you meant: "I need a reasonable expectation that I will be able to fleece everyone else when I offer it on the marketplace."

      Or do you think that although, in general, monopolies must be prevented "to make a market work properly", sometimes a monopoly must be created in order to "make markets work properly", and that Congre
    • Markets are fascinating. Already they've been used to predict flu outbreaks with greater accuracy than experts.
      The Iowa Electronic Markets [uiowa.edu] is very interesting and in the UK there's a growing trend to use betting markets on political events to predict results.

      Of course markets fail, and this one may, but its definitely worth a go, especially if it can be linked to implementing the idea somehow.
    • If a true market were to be created, you could maintain your value by not selling all of your shares.

      Let's assume you've discovered The Next Big Idea. So you create a "company" with a ticker symbol of TNBI and issue 100 shares. Keep 50 for yourself and IPO the rest. If your idea has any merit, the shares will climb in value and the 50 shares that you've retained will be your compensation.

  • It's a trap! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jester998 ( 156179 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:08PM (#14999088) Homepage
    We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people here

    Anyone who submits an idea gets labelled "not a team player" for not backing management's ludicrous schemes.

    It's a trap!

    [/end Dilbert-esque paranoia]

  • Idea Stock Exchange (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:13PM (#14999104)
    I'm going to short neoconservatism.

  • Art by committee... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IanDanforth ( 753892 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:15PM (#14999110)
    The difficulty in any system like this is what I like to call the Artistic Paradox.

    Great art comes from experience and talent. It almost always comes from the vision of a single individual. Truly fine art cannot be done by committee.

    Thus while brilliant and committed people in business need the ideas of those people around them, a system like this can only serve as an inspirational tool for those people with talent. The idea is not the art, the execution of that idea is.

    I have lots of great ideas, but no matter how many I give out, or see on the web, few, if any, ever get done. Why? Because I'm lazy.

    This marketplace could easily give rise to dependence on it for ideas, and ignore the fact that people who can get things done often don't have the best ideas, but because they can accomplish them, are infinitely more valuable than the armchair quarterbacks scattered throughout a company. And asking people to implement ideas other than their own, even if they are objectively better, reduces a talented individuals ability to great true greatness.

    -Ian
    • Great art comes from experience and talent. It almost always comes from the vision of a single individual. Truly fine art cannot be done by committee.

      While not quite a committee, how 'bout remixes -- hip-hop, mashups, or otherwise? I'm sure there's some sort of exception to allow for that. Afterall, remixes are quite popular, some are quite artistic, if not so long lasting. [wikipedia.org]

    • this is a win for everybody (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Schlemphfer ( 556732 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:47PM (#14999226) Homepage
      >This marketplace could easily give rise to dependence on it for ideas,
      >and ignore the fact that people who can get things done often don't
      >have the best ideas, but because they can accomplish them, are
      >infinitely more valuable than the armchair quarterbacks scattered
      >throughout a company.

      Those people you're mentioning who "get can things done," -- isn't it to their interest, and everybody's interest, that they are implementing the very best ideas available? It's not like anybody's suggesting that these people be fired -- if anything the value of what they're able to produce increases as they are given better projects to see through to completion.

      And those "armchair quarterbacks" -- this term seems needlessly insulting, by the way -- if these quarterbacks are able to come up with the very best ideas in the company, shouldn't they receive all the encouragement in the world to dream up new ideas? And shouldn't they share the spoils of this success with the people who can implement these great ideas?

      Seems to me that this stock exchange idea is win/win/win for the GTD people, the quarterback people, and the company as a whole.

      • " ... Those people you're mentioning who "get can things done," -- isn't it to their interest, and everybody's interest, that they are implementing the very best ideas available? ..."

        They do implement the very best ideas available at the time they're considering new ideas.

        Once you begin to actually implement an idea (we could call this "getting things done") you are now unavailable to consider new ideas (we could call this "I'm too busy getting this done").

        Whether the reason is "busy implementing" or "not r

  • If this is true, they'll succede (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drewzhrodague ( 606182 ) <drew&zhrodague,net> on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:15PM (#14999111) Homepage Journal
    That's right, good ideas don't only come from one person in the 'idea department.' If this holds true, and people aren't punished for speaking up, they may be much better for it -- and be able to monitize those ideas. Many companies I have worked for in the past, have an 'open door' policy with opinions, ideas, and better ways to do things. Not once have I ever heard a success story from someone piping-up. Didn't someone say something about hiring people smarter than you?
  • I have the feeling that an awful lot of ideas out there are the "penny stock" kind -- you know, the type you get a lot of spam about...
  • It might've worked in Japan. It won't work in the Western world. Here's how it would most likely end up:

    Some worker on the chain finds out that what he does could be streamlined. He commits some of his free time (you don't think you'll be allowed to hand in ideas during work hours, do you?) to write down his idea and submit it.

    Middle management sees the idea, ponders it and punches as hard against it as it can, since it comes from one of the grunt workers and by default, they can't have good ideas. If they
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The idea of a pure meritocracy, although noble, is doomed because it is at odds with existing hierarchies.

      In a sense it's the same reason why getting a degree is a good idea nearly 100% of the time. Bill Gates may be the richest man in the world AND a college dropout, but the only reason he was able to achieve this was that he (with a number of other people) formed his own company. The minute you want to step away from the entrepreneurial path you need to have a degree -- any degree, as long as it's a valid
    • Did you even read the article? Oh wait, this is /.
      Your "description" of how it works is utterly and completely wrong. In fact, it's near opposite to how this program works.

      I'd tell you to RTFA, but it seems clear you're just trolling.
      As someone already commented, I'd hate to work at your company.

  • Google (Score:4, Insightful)

    by binkzz ( 779594 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:20PM (#14999127) Journal
    Isn't that what Google already does, with their personal project time and whatnot? That's how GMail got started, and Picasa, and probably a few other things.

    • Re:Google (Score:2, Informative)

      by bheer ( 633842 )
      Isn't that what Google already does, with their personal project time and whatnot? That's how GMail got started, and Picasa, and probably a few other things.

      Google has done some good things, but please don't give them more credit than due. Picasa was acquired [google.com].

    • Re:Google (Score:3, Informative)

      by FleaPlus ( 6935 )
      Isn't that what Google already does, with their personal project time and whatnot?

      I'm not sure what personal-project time has to do with having an internal ideas market, but Google does coincidentally have an internal prediction market, which they described in their official blog last year [blogspot.com]. From the description:

      At Google, we're constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world's information, including information relevant to our business. Building on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the Iowa Electron

  • Great.... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by RazorJ_2000 ( 164431 )
    Great concept but I can already envision a problem in the (lawless) US where an employee comes up with a great idea and some other employees leave to go pursue development and market delivery of said idea. And they get sued for idea theft or something along that line. What, did something similar happen with RIM / NTP where one great company developed a real, market demanded product that another (totally useless) company claimed was their idea? Hmm... food for thought in the mighty US, isn't it.

    (long live C
  • ...was among those who came up with the idea. He did note that there was a flaw in the plan, that is, not enough incentive for people to "buy" and "sell" stocks in these ideas, despite the few incentives put in place. The people at NYTimes are currently trying to think of a new incentive method to completely replace the current one, without costing the company much.

  • A great idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by argoff ( 142580 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:29PM (#14999159)
    Believe that patents and copyrights are sewage, and act on that belief accordingly.

    If you did, you would have seen that the internet is more than a passing fad (1992), that Linux
    was more than a "toy" os (1996), that the x86 architecture and the IBM compatable PC was going
    to take over the market place(2000) inspite of it's original inherent design flaws. That p2p was going
    to explode in usage, that ethernet would win out over Novell, and Token-Ring despite being
    "technically" inferior. Plus you would have been able to anticipate the technology explosion
    that happens every few years when a new technologies 18th annaversary approaches and patents start to
    run out.

    All to often, a companies version of a great idea is something that they can patent, sit on,
    and collect royalities on without any real application usage or work. Well, bullshit - it's just
    the opposite. A great idea is something that proliferates and spreads in usage freely, without
    restriction.
    • When the hell are you fucking morons going to realize that intellectual property protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the idea itself? This is a very basic concept and withoutunderstanding it we get the mindless crap often repeated on Slashdot like that from the parent thread.

      • When the hell are you fucking morons going to realize that intellectual property protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the idea itself? This is a very basic concept and withoutunderstanding it we get the mindless crap often repeated on Slashdot like that from the parent thread.

        property? protects? EXPRESSION? mindless crap? I think you need to re-evaluate your statement.

        This is half the problem, too many people just think that the patnet and copyright issues are just semantic issues. they are

      • With luck nobody will realize that because you're wrong. copyright protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. However, copyright is not the only form of intellectual property. Another important form is the patent. Patents protect the idea, not merely its expression.

    • The IBM compatible PC was already pretty obviously the future of the market place in 1995. By 2000 you'd have to be working in a different industry and be struck deaf and blind not to know this. Your other dates seem pretty specious too.

  • In the age of... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2006 @03:29PM (#14999162)
    ...employment agreements where the employer claims dominion over something the employee thinks of when he's taking a dump in his house during his Christmas vacation, I don't see how anyone would be trusting enough to throw their good ideas out for the taking like that. What if the company takes your idea and makes billions with it? What's to prevent the company from screwing you from a compensation standpoint?
    • "What's to prevent the company from screwing you from a compensation standpoint?"

      Not a single thing. However, note that there is a feedback loop here; it's in the companys' long term interest not to do this. If the company is run by the typical quick-buck artists, then word gets around, and people aren't as motivated to offer their best ideas to the company.

      If a competitor has a better compensation plan for employees, then this implementation plan should (in theory) work better there; and over the long term
  • There are plenty of online exchanges for info and ideas, even problems that need solutions that link corporate R&D, Universities, and individual scientists. This is how a lot of companies innovate today - through collaboration, called C&D.

    Here's a few:

    ninesigma.net
    InnoCentive.com
    Yet2.com

  • Oh great (Score:2, Funny)

    by Oldsmobile ( 930596 )
    Oh great, a ponzi scheme but with ideas.
  • The system recognizes the need for harvesting ideas from the entire company [...] so we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius.
    We call it "The Matrix".
  • I dunno if a stock market is the best way to model this, it feels more like a futures market to me.

  • "Idea Futures" (Score:4, Informative)

    by samkass ( 174571 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @04:59PM (#14999462) Homepage Journal
    Really early in the Internet's history (about TEN YEARS ago!!!) there was a site called "Idea Futures" that did exactly what this article describes. It was pretty fun... I wonder if it's the same folks.

  • There are a number of "idea banks" already on the Web such as Should Exist [shouldexist.org] and Halfbakery [halfbakery.com]. These sites are a bit diffrent from the approach described in the NYT article though.

  • This and other business plan sources... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spoonyfork ( 23307 ) <spoonyfork@@@gmail...com> on Sunday March 26, 2006 @05:19PM (#14999535) Journal
    This and other business plans sources can be found in the book The Wisdom of Crowds [amazon.com] by James Surowiecki.
  • When Pentagon tried this [pbs.org] to help predict the outcomes of and details of conflicts, terrorist acts, etcaetera, the project went down in flames amid accusations of "trading in blood and destruction" and similar nonsense.

    The idea is not entirely dead yet, and so the opposition continues its histerical "criticism [hangoverguide.com]" of it...

    • Robin Hanson (who worked on the Policy Analysis Market you describe) actually has a pretty neat research paper analyzing the media's reaction to the project. Here's the abstract:

      Title: The Informed Press Favored the Policy Analysis Market [gmu.edu]

      The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), otherwise known (inaccurately) as "terrorism
      futures," burst into public view in a firestorm of condemnation on July 29, 2003,
      and was canceled within one day. We look at the impression given of PAM by five
      hundred media articles, and how that
  • That's a key lesson behind the rise of open source technology, most notably Linux. A ragtag army of programmers organized into groups, wrote computer code, made the code available for anyone to revise and, by competing and cooperating in a global community, reshaped the market for software. The brilliance of Linux as a model of innovation is that it is powered by the grass-roots brilliance of the thousands of programmers who created it.

    Just in case anyone might wonder why this on /. ...
  • Did anyone else think of "The Hudsucker Proxy" when they read this article?

    "What is it? A circle?"

    "It's a hula hoop!"

    "No one will ever buy that."
  • A related idea I had recently which I wanted to toss into the open...

    Lately on slashdot we've been having a few stories about the (Snow Crash-like) Second Life virtual world, and its active virtual economy. Take this article from Wired:

    Wired: Making a Living in Second Life [wired.com]

    I think it would be quite interesting to try using Second Life's economy and scriptable world to create an in-game prediction market [wikipedia.org], similar to that described in the NYT article. Instead of using a purely reputation-based currency such a

  • More on prediction markets (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FleaPlus ( 6935 ) on Sunday March 26, 2006 @08:46PM (#15000119) Journal
    I'm happy to finally see a slashdot story on prediction markets [wikipedia.org], like the one described in the article, as they're one of the neatest new concepts I've come across. They've shown themselves to be on average the most accurate way to predict future events, more accurate than, say, individual experts or opinion polls. Having people "put their money where their mouth is" greatly improves the quality of predictions.

    If you've never seen a prediction market in action before, I highly recommend checking out the real-money Intrade [intrade.com] market, or the virtual-money Foresight Exchange [ideosphere.com]. At such markets you can get estimated probabities for almost any major event. Here's a few examples from Intrade:

    * Sony Playstation 3 release before October 6: 33% chance
    * Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008: 43.1%
    * John McCain to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008: 36.6%
    * Osama Bin Laden to be captured/neutralised by 30 June 2006: 5.7%
    * Donald Rumsfeld to announce his resignation on/before 31Dec2006: 18.5%
    * Bird flu (H5N1) to be confirmed in the USA ON/BEFORE 31st December 2006: 70.0%

    That said, I think the company described in the article can probably improve the way they handle their pay-offs. From the article:

    At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed description -- called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus -- and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in "opinion money" to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project. Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock becomes a product or delivers savings.

    The wording in the article is a little ambiguous, but it seems that if you choose to bid on an idea which you "know" is good, and would be if it were selected as a product, if other people don't agree you lose your money. It would be better to have a system where if the stock isn't selected as a product, you get your money back. If the product is selected, you gain money if the product does well, and lose money if the product does poorly. This also adds an incentive for people to "short" popular ideas that they think are going to perform poorly.
    • Maybe this would be obvious if I understood real stocks better, but how do they determine the share price for imaginary stocks? As I read it, the 'idea stocks' use imaginary money, and only the people who implement the good ideas get real money bonuses. I also couldn't tell if they're locked at $10,000 or if they earn more monopoly money for backing ideas that turn out well, thereby giving them a bigger say in subsequent ideas.
      • Maybe this would be obvious if I understood real stocks better, but how do they determine the share price for imaginary stocks? As I read it, the 'idea stocks' use imaginary money, and only the people who implement the good ideas get real money bonuses. I also couldn't tell if they're locked at $10,000 or if they earn more monopoly money for backing ideas that turn out well, thereby giving them a bigger say in subsequent ideas.

        Again, I'm not sure how the company described in the article does things, but in

  • Idea Theft? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by supremebob ( 574732 ) <themejunky AT geocities DOT com> on Sunday March 26, 2006 @09:21PM (#15000235) Journal
    I'm curious... What kinds of protections are built into this idea exchange to keep people from stealing one person's Billion dollar idea and then patenting it as their own? I'd hate to see some greedy bastards using this site, and end up creating the next SCO or Rambus style legal dispute.
  • we own all of our employees ideas and we have a large legal team of patent experts....

    To sum up our business, its to play teh lawsuit game, to sue any and everybody who uses any of the same ideas that the brains we employ come up with first. Or licenses those ideas to any who want to do them.

    Since the USPTO is leaning towards the patenting of not just ideas but the thought of an idea......

    http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-05.ht m [commondreams.org]
  • Wouldn't it be valuable to let customers participate?

    It probably wouldn't work for new product development, but it would be a very cheap way to find out which features your customers want in Version 2.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • We tried to get HP to do this... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Sunday March 26, 2006 @11:10PM (#15000548) Homepage Journal
    But it was shot down by management.

    I'm not kidding.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • It was during the transition to Carly but it never got high enough up to be directly attributable to the executive suite.

        Indeed, executive decision support systems like this are precisely what the executive suite needs and it tends to be the layers just below them that are the most resistant so it's a catch-22. The executives typically have the mentality of the stock analysts and their immediate underlings are all-too-aware that upon this weakness their jobs depend.

  • Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right. The stock market makes poor decisions and often purchasing decisions are based on just how "off" experts say that the market is (Google is undervalued/overvalued, etc). I mean, it's fine if companies want to cull their employees for ideas but I hope they don't come under the
    • Why is there such universal agreement in regards to this "wisdom of the market" concept. Who says? Where is the definitive proof. i play on the Foresight Exchange (www.ideosphere.com) with everybody else and it's NOT always right.

      The claim isn't that prediction markets are omniscient -- just that they're on average better than any of the alternatives.
  • There is a limitless number of ideas, but there is a limited number of experienced workers who can turn ideas into a product. Instead of collecting huge stacks of ideas and let the workers browse through them, the idea-makers should actively sell their ideas to the workers. I mean, workers usually have good ideas of their own, and don't need someone sueing them because they implemented an idea (which they thought up themselves) that already existed in the huge stack. I have no problem with people making mon
  • Doesn't this sound like the Delphi Boards in The Shockwave Rider?

    ttyl
              Farrell

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